Mervi Mantsinen

Ten things you may not know about the plasma:

1. It’s the fourth state of matter: Solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Plasma is a super-heated gas, so hot that its electrons get out of the atom’s orbit and roam free. A gas thus becomes a plasma when extreme heat causes its atoms to shed their electrons.
2. It’s everywhere. Plasma is the most abundant form of visible matter in the universe – it is thought to make up 99 percent of what we see in the night sky. Plasma populates and dominates the vast regions of interstellar and interplanetary space.
3. Stars, like the sun, are gigantic balls of plasma. And there are billions of them, so studying plasma can help us understand the cosmos.

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At the JET reactor at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy,  the film maker Tom Scott talks to the engineers about fusion power, being the hottest place in the solar system, deliberate disruptions, and about the surround-sound speakers that give a diagnostic test you might not expect.

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Harnessing the energy produced in nuclear fusion reactions is an ongoing grand challenge. Recent Nature Physics Insight focuses on the achievements made so far and the trials ahead, highlighting that at the core of nuclear fusion lies some fascinating physics.

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Power Technology has published an interesting article on fusion research, given the first promising results from the new Wendelstein 7-X stellarator device at the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics.

Wendelstein 7-X produced its first hydrogen plasma in February 2016, sparking speculation that the stellarator could overtake the tokamak as the leading experimental form of nuclear fusion energy production.

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